The One All-Black Town Worth the Pain: American Exceptionalism, Historical Narration, and the Critique of Nationhood in Toni Morrison's Paradise - African - Critical Essay

African American Review, Summer, 2001 by Katrine Dalsgard

In her most recent novel, Paradise (1998), Toni Morrison offers us the story of a small western African American community, Ruby, whose contemporary members understand themselves in relation to an historical narrative of ancestral perseverance, idealism, and triumph. According to their self-narrative, they are the descendants of a group of wandering ex-slaves who--at God's command and after having been rejected by a string of already established pioneer communities, black as well as white--eventually succeeded in establishing the perfect, all-black community of Haven in a far-away place in Oklahoma. Though the community was later removed to another secluded place, still in Oklahoma, where it attained its present name, by 1976, the time of the narrative present for most of the novel, it has come to seem the fulfillment of its founding fathers' paradisiacal promise. Having thrived and prospered where other black communities failed, in its own parlance it now appears "the one all-black town worth the pain" (5).

In spite of Ruby's superior self-narrative, however, by 1976 a vast discrepancy has developed between the community's perfect and stable self-image and its actual conditions and cultural practices. As things now are in Ruby, unwanted children are conceived and aborted, wished-for children are born "broken," and the young have begun to react against the conservative lifestyle and authoritarian politics of the community's leading elders. Though at first the community's patriarchs react to this development by launching a series of angry accusations against its young male lions of failing their ancestral responsibility, the novel culminates in a horrific massacre conducted by these two groups of men on a group of unconventional women living in a place called the Convent. In this way Morrison suggests that the price of Ruby's insistence on maintaining a morally superior master narrative may well be the sacrifice of that very narrative. Rather than a perfect paradise, Ruby ends up as a conservative, patriarchal, t horoughly racialized, and violent community.

By molding Ruby's self-narrative in the cast of an ancestral heroic commemoration of the success of the community's founding fathers in establishing a covenanted community in an inhospitable western landscape, by dramatizing the angry accusations made by the community's contemporary patriarchs against the younger generations when the discrepancy between its morally superior master narrative and its actual cultural practices becomes too vast to ignore, and by ultimately having Ruby scapegoat a group of unconventional women for its internal problems, Morrison invites us critically to acknowledge the presence of one of the most canonical European American narratives--that of American exceptionalism, in African American discourse.

Used widely across the whole spectrum of American Studies, this narrative and the ideology behind it defy easy definition. As it appears from Dale Carter's survey article "American Exceptionalism: An Idea That Will Not Die" (1997), the concept has been defined in a great variety of ways, depending on the individual scholar's discipline. Among literary historians, however, there is fairly general consensus about the definition offered by Thomas B. Byers in his 1997 article "A City upon a Hill: American Literature and the Ideology of Exceptionalism": "American exceptionsm ... is the claim that America is ... unique, one of a (superior) kind--and generally that that kind carries with it a unique moral value and responsibility" (86). From this perspective, American exceptionalism resounds the story of the small group of Puritan pilgrims who fled from persecution in England in the early seventeenth century in order to establish an exemplary Christian community-"a city upon a hill," as it was termed by their leade r, John Winthrop--in the new world. Continuing a general European desire for a utopian "place that was not Europe but rather its opposite"--a desire that had preoccupied the European imagination even before the American continent was discovered--this group, according to Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury, defined the American utopia in relation to "one source above all, the Bible, and especially its opening chapters, Genesis and Exodus, the tale of the Chosen People and the Promised Land. For the Puritans ... the essential tale was a religious one of travail and wandering, with the Lord's guidance, in quest of a high purpose and a millennial history" (9). On this ideological background, the Puritans believed themselves to make a covenant with God on the voyage over, according to which a successful landing on the shores of the "unknown" western land would imply that He had chosen them for the strenuous task of establishing His Kingdom on the frontier of the New World's natural and religious wilderness. [1] Af ter their safe arrival, the Puritans therefore imagined their community to be endowed with a special moral responsibility and thus themselves assumed a superior position in relation to the rest of the world. This belief in God's approval of their mission was further strengthened in the course of the first generation, as their hard labor resulted in substantial success and prosperity.